page_title: State of Sequoyah
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: State of Sequoyah / Background
context_page_description: The State of Sequoyah was a proposed state to be established from the Indian Territory in the eastern part of present-day Oklahoma. In 1905, with the end of tribal governments looming, Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—in Indian Territory proposed to create a state as a means to retain control of their lands. Their intention was to have a state under Native American constitution and governance. The proposed state was to be named in honor of Sequoyah, the Cherokee who created a writing system in 1825 for the Cherokee language.
context_section_description: Starting in 1890, when Congress passed the Oklahoma Organic Act, the land that now forms the State of Oklahoma was made up of two separate territories: Oklahoma Territory to the west and the Indian Territory to the east. The Indian Territory had a large Native American population. The territory had been reduced by required land cessions after the Civil War, land runs, and other treaties with the United States. In the 1900 US Census, Native Americans composed 13.4 percent of the population in the future state. In 1905, the Five Civilized Tribes had a total of about 60,000 persons in the Indian Territory out of a total population of 600,000.
  Until 1903, the Five Civilized Tribes and other tribes in Indian Territory had generally opposed all local and national efforts for statehood, whether they were single or joint with Oklahoma Territory. That changed as the date set by Congress (March 4, 1906) for the breakup of tribal governments and communal lands in the territory approached. The desire of tribal leaders to retain their historic authority and for the territory to be admitted as a single state, apart from Oklahoma Territory, culminated at the Sequoyah Convention, which met as a whole in 1905 on August 21 and 22 and September 5 to 8.
caption: Oklahoma and Indian Territories, 1900
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